Permanently Damaged: Long-Term Follow-Up of Shaken Babies

Abstract

Shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a term denoting a particularly harmful form of child abuse. By definition,¹these infants have intracranial and retinal hemorrhages in the absence of signs of head trauma or skull fracture. Most SBS victims appear to have significant neurologic damage at the time of diagnosis.^2,3The medical literature, however, does not describe these children as they grow older. A 1986 article⁴called for follow-up studies on these children, but a computerized literature search turned up only one paper on long-term follow-up in SBS. Sinal and Ball⁵described cranial computerized tomog-raphic (CT) and clinical follow-up in 24 brain-injured children, 17 of whom had SBS. They followed the 15 surviving shaken infants for about 4 years: seven had severe handicaps, and only one was normal.